For first time ever, Mad Cow disease found in California cow

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A case of mad cow disease was found at a Central Valley dairy rendering facility, but some public officials are not that worried. (KGO-TV)

This Tuesday, April 24, 2012, photo shows a truck entering Baker Commodities transfer station, where a cow with mad cow disease was discovered, in Hanford, Calif. The first new case of mad cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 has been discovered in a dairy cow in California, but health authorities said Tuesday the animal never was a threat to the nation's food supply. The infected cow, the fourth ever discovered in the U.S., was found as part of an Agriculture Department surveillance program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for the fatal brain disease. (AP Photo/The Fresno Bee, John Walker )

In an announcement that could raise new questions about food safety and result in economic setbacks to California’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday said that a case of mad cow disease has been found in a dairy cow in the Central Valley.

The incident represents the first time the disease has been found in California — and the first case in the United States since 2006.

John Clifford, the USDA’s chief veterinary officer, said the cow was discovered at a rendering company and that the animal’s carcass is now being held there as part of an investigation. The public is not at risk from the animal, he said.

“It was never presented for slaughter for human consumption, so at no time presented a risk to the food supply or human health,” Clifford said.

But many questions remained unanswered late Tuesday: Where did the cow come from? How did it get the disease? Were there other animals in the herd that might be infected? And was the meat from them sold for public consumption?

The cow tested positive at a transfer facility in Hanford, 15 miles west of Visalia in Kings County, operated by Baker Commodities, the company confirmed Tuesday. Baker has 21 plants across the United States that convert animal byproducts into pet food, poultry feed and tallow, used in soaps, paints and cosmetics. The company advertises that it provides “dead stock removal” for dairy cows and cattle.

Dead livestock are brought to the transfer facility to have their hides removed before going to a rendering plant at Kerman 48 miles to the north. The animal was tested as part of a random sampling program.

“Our facility collected it from a local dairy,” said Dennis Luckey, executive vice president of the company. “It was going to be rendered.”

Luckey said he didn’t know which dairy it came from or other details, such as the age of the animal.

Although many dairy cows in the U.S. eventually are slaughtered for pet food and other products, some are turned into ground beef and other types of meat for human consumption, including hamburgers at fast-food restaurants and on school lunch menus.

Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is a progressive brain disease that is always fatal in cattle.

The disease can be transmitted to humans through eating meat tainted with infected brain or nerve tissue of an infected animal. It is not transmitted through consumption of milk, the USDA emphasized on Tuesday. The human form, known as variant Creutzfeldt—Jakob disease, is rare but can be fatal.

After a dairy cow in Washington state was diagnosed with mad cow disease in 2003, it devastated the U.S. beef industry. Dozens of countries refused to import U.S. beef, and American beef shipments plunged 82 percent. When the disease swept across Britain’s farms in the 1980s and ’90s, an estimated 3.7 million animals were slaughtered. The disease was linked to the deaths of 180,000 cattle and about 150 people.

California agriculture officials Tuesday issued a statement, saying the discovery of the animal indicates that the state’s food-safety system works.

“Milk and beef remain safe to consume. The disease is not transmitted through milk,” said Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “Because of the strength of the food protection system, the cow did not enter the food or feed supply.”

But critics said the incident shows shortcomings in the USDA’s safety regulations. “Since the Bush administration, the number of cows tested each year has diminished,” said Elisa Odabashian, West Coast director of Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports.

“Only 40,000 cows a year — of millions of millions slaughtered — are tested,” she said. “We don’t know if this is an isolated, unusual event — or if they are not finding it because they are not looking. There very well may be more beef that has this disease. Our monitoring program is tiny.”

California is the nation’s largest agricultural-producing state, with $37 billion in farm products. Milk is the largest crop by dollar value, worth $5.9 billion in 2010. Beef cattle are a $2 billion industry statewide.

The meat industry worked hard Tuesday to reassure consumers.

James Hodges, vice president for the American Meat Institute, a national trade organization, noted that the U.S. has only had four cases of mad cow disease since 2003, with none linked to a human fatality.

“Certainly, BSE news can generate concerns and questions, but the facts show that our animal disease-prevention system is strong and our beef is safe,” Hodges said.

The institute, however, worked hard in recent years to overturn California’s strict standards for livestock treatment. After the 2003 mad cow incident, Congress banned farmers from selling “downer cows” — cows too sick to walk — from being processed into human food.

California went a step further, passing a state law in 2009 that required meat processors to euthanize any downed livestock — including pigs, goats and sheep — and keep them from the food supply. The National Meat Association and the American Meat Institute sued, arguing that federal law prohibits California from passing tougher rules. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed and blocked California’s law.

At stake with such regulations and Tuesday’s announcement are billions of dollars in commerce.

In 1989, the United States began prohibiting imports of cattle, sheep and goats from countries that have cases of BSE. In 1997, after the British mad cow outbreak, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the practice of adding slaughterhouse scraps to animal feed. Until then, the U.S. agricultural industry, like Britain’s, turned such scraps into cattle feed and fertilizer.

This process, known as animal recycling, can cause low-level infection to become dramatically amplified. In Britain and other countries, spread of the disease in cattle has occurred when cattle ate feed containing infected tissue and bone meal.

U.S. ranchers now feed their cattle supplements made from soy-based proteins and cotton seed meal. But cattle tissue can still be used in other animal feed, for pets, poultry, pigs and other animals. Some experts have become concerned that the feed types could at times be accidentally mixed, particularly in large mills that make both kinds.

The form of the disease detected “is a very rare form not associated with an animal consuming infected feed,” said Ross, of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

“CDFA veterinarians are working with the USDA to investigate this case and to identify whether additional cows are at risk,” she said. “Feed restrictions in place in California and around the country for the last 15 years minimize that risk to the greatest degree possible.”

Paul Rogers has covered a wide range of issues for The Mercury News since 1989, including water, oceans, energy, logging, parks, endangered species, toxics and climate change. He also works as managing editor of the Science team at KQED, the PBS and NPR station in San Francisco, and has taught science writing at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

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